NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/10293

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From: Hank Roth <[e-mail]>
Subject: PLP on SANDERO (4)
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/* Written 10:28 pm  Jan 23, 1993 by [e-mail] in igc:p.news */
/* ---------- "PLP on SANDERO (4)" ---------- */
<<< via P_news/p.nes >>>
{From THE COMMUNIST, the political journal of the Progressive
Labor Party, Number 6/Fall/1992}

[I am presenting this article, by the PLP, on Sandero Luminoso,
for informational purposes. It contains an accurate picture of
life in Peru and provides, in my opinion, a better understanding
of how different politics happens in the Third World. Be aware
also that theory and practice tend to converge at first, but
then they diverge from orthodox analysis and practice due to those
exigencies that are caused by circumstance which are particularly
peculiar to Latin America and specifically to Peru.

The article is naturally critical of Sandero because of a
difference in political analysis and process between the PLP and
the SL, and anyone reading this material should bare that in
mind. This article should thus be read with a certain objective
`truth seeking' detachment and a degree of skepticism, no less so
than reports coming in from various amnesty groups and other
tendencies with a possible ax to grind, and in that respect this
reading and further reading from other sources should [can]
present a totality that will be closer to the truth.---Hank Roth]

                            Part 4 (of 4)

Now, if these racist social activities are constantly going on
(as they are in this world), and if SHINING PATH chooses to
ignore them (as it does), does that make them disappear? Only
psychotics imagine the real world disappears when they choose to
ignore it.

Marxism teaches that life is constant activity. Social life is
constant class struggle. "Struggle is constant." Everything we do
has its effect. Everything we fail to do has its effect. To not
do something is another way of doing that thing's opposite. We
are swamped in a racist high tide. To go with the flow is to go
with racism. To oppose racism we need to swim actively against
the current. That is why SHINING PATH's hands-off attitude to
racism appears to be neutral, but can only take material form as
the opposite of neutral---as partisan, as pro-racist.

There is a good example from the Second World War of how central
anti-racism is to the struggle against capitalism. When Nazi
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 to re-establish
capitalism, anti-Jewish racism (anti-Semitism) was the main way
they tried to win over the Soviet citizens they were trying to
conquer--mainly Russians and Ukrainians, who, before the
Communist revolution, had been well trained in anti-Semitism. The
Stalin leadership didn't try to dodge the issue. They rejected
the SHINING PATH line that they should be "neutral" on racism, or
that would hold back mobilizing support for the Soviet state.
Instead, the communists took a forthright anti-racist position.
Ilya Ehrenburg, then the leading Soviet writer, put it this way:
"You are either an anti-Nazi or an anti-Semite." What was the
result? Support for the Soviet state was never higher than during
World War II, although by SHINING PATH logic, that should not
have happened.

On the other hand, there are two instructive examples of how
SHINING PATH "neutralism" becomes open racism.

The March, 1991 issue of the SHINING PATH monthly newspaper
refers on page 4 to Peruvian President Fujimori (whose parents
were Japanese) as "the slanty-eyed ruler." The actual colloquial
meaning of the phrase in Peru is much more vicious. It is a
brutal racial insult typical of the Klan, of France's racist
politician Le Pen, of Hitler and Goebbels. It is unimaginable
that such a phrase could be uttered by a communist, much less be
printed in a communist newspaper.

The second example has to do with the USA group that SHINING PATH
refers to as its close ally, a group which also promotes
"Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo Thought." This is a small group
which calls itself the "Revolutionary Communist Party", and which
has been around since the early 1970s. Its line on racism has
always been the same SHINING PATH line we have been discussing.
In 1974-76 fascist forces in Boston tried to organize a mass
racist movement, using opposition to school integration as their
organizing device. At first they were very successful, and they
were looking forward to leading a nationwide anti-black racist
mass movement. PLP determined to try to stop this dangerous
fascist threat by  killing it in its cradle. PLP sent cadres to
Boston, organized volunteers, and worked with working people in
Boston to organize against the Boston fascists' movement. PLP
succeeded, which was important. Conditions in the USA would have
been even worse if there had been a mass racist movement active.
But guess who joined the fascist effort and participated in the
fascist demonstrations? Right---the "Revolutionary Communist
Party." What was their excuse|? The SHINING PATH line, expressed
this way: "Busing black students to predominently white schools
to integrate the schools is a liberal plot to divide the working
class, and stir up whites against blacks."

Marxism hold that the main way humans are different from each
other is through class division. The working class has interests
and needs which are antagonistic to the capitalists. The working
class outlook on life is in basic conflict with the capitalist
outlook on life. The idea that "anti-racist struggles would only
call attention to differences within the working class and hold
back mobilizing working class unity for the revolution" actually
amounts to justifying the opposing notion: that humans are
unbridgably divided by skin color and culture, and that class
diovisions in society are a secondary division. (By this logic
Peruvian bosses are not as bad--for Peruvian workers---as U.S.
bosses, whereas Peruvian bosses are worse--for U.S. workers---
than U.S. bosses.)

But this is completely senseless. Are differences in skin color
or in culture the product of different species of humans? Are
there different species of humans? Are humans like cats and dogs,
lions and lambs--not to be stirred up? If this is the working
class' true nature, then the working class would be able to
achieve its liberation in communism only if it remained ignorant
of its true nature!

Modern science has given the lie to what is implied by the
SHINING PATH position. Modern science has conclusively shown that
all people alive today are descended from common ancestors who
arose about 200,000 years ago in Africa, and that class division
in society is the primary way humans are "different" from each
other. SHINING PATH is justifying precisely what the Nazis said
in a crude way and what today's sociobiologists promote in a
sophisticated "scientific" way. A "communist" movement that
doesn't combat this kind of thinking tooth and nail isn't worth
spit.

SHINING PATH's idea also attacks the great history of Peruvian
people's resistance. The history of the Peruvian people form the
Spanish conquest in 1533 up to the present is one of horrible
racist oppression and heroic resistance. The largest of hundreds
of revolts was put down at a cost of 200,000 Indian lives. In no
country has racist oppression been more ferocious than in Peru.

When Pizarro, the Spanish repreentative of burgeoning European
capitalism, "discovered" Peru in 1526 there were some 20 million
Peruvians living in an agrarian communist society in the
continent's most developed and powerful civilization. By 1570, as
a result of the Spaniards' holocaust (which combined slaughter,
smallpox, slavery and starvation) the population had been reduced
to 1.3 million. Continued oppression killed another half, so that
only 600,000 remained alive in 1630. [Ronald Wright, STOLEN
CONTINENTS, NY, 1992, pg 185] The Inca civilization was
destroyed, although the basis of Indian society---the ayllu---was
not. (The population didn't recover to pre-Conquest levels until
the 1980s.)

The Spanish capitalist came to Peru to loot and enslave. In 1532
alone they melted down enough Incan art objects to ship back to
Spain seven tons of silver--a value greater than any European
king had then at his disposal. In 1534 they shipped back another
four tons of gold. [Wright, IBID, pg 82] Adventurers, gold and
silver prospectors, priests and lawyers came to Peru, not as
settlers. They super-imposed a feudal system of huge farms on the
ayllus, turning the free Indian farmers into serfs, bound to the
soil, absolutely dominated and controlled by the landlord and
forced to work for him for free. This feudal landlord ruling
class controlled Peru until the 1970s.

But the capitalistgs' policy was contradictory and self-
defeating. From the capitalist point of view, there were both too
many Indians and too few Indians. There were too many Indians
because the ruling class was too small to control them. To solve
this problem the rulers took two tacks. First, they needed a
buffer population to stand between the mass of exploited and
oppressed Indian labor and themselves. They created a native
class of ruling-class hangers on: judges, policemen, and other
petty power-holders to help police and administer the feudal
order. And they imported slaves from Africa. (By 1600 there were
already 30,000 African slaves in Lima, the colonial capital.) The
second tack had three aspects: exterminate the Indians; breed the
"inferior race" out of existence, [From this arose the MESTIZOS,
people of mixed Indian caucasian parentage who today number more
than 40% of the population. Though most mestizos are working
people, there is an upperclass small town mestizo  elite. This is
the group that traditionally oppressed the Indian peasants, and
spread the "mestizo ideology" that "Indians are inferior."]
assimilate them (ban Quechua, their language, force them to learn
Spanish, ban their culture, etc.). Still, no matter how hard the
Spanish rulers tried (and they tried very hard indeed), they
couldn't get rid of the Indians and Indian culture.

But the problem of controlling too many Indians was overwhelmed
by a more serious problem: the ruling class found it actually
didn't have enough Indians. The rulers needed more labor power to
exploit the natural wealth they had conquered. They tried
importing slaves from Africa, but that didn't work because they
couldn't import enough. In time they couldn't import any at all.
When they ran out of black slaves they imported contract labor
from China. It was in this way, through agony, murder, slavery
and racism, that the capitalists created their Peruvian labor
force.

>From colonial times until today labor was always a shameful and
oppressive condition forced upon mainly nonwhite workers. The
white ruling class always lived a life of luxurious indolence in
Lima. How well they benefited from racist exploitation is easy to
see. In the mid-1960s (a time when everybody agrees life was
better in Peru than it is now) the 24,000 individuals who
basically made up the white Lima ruling class each had an average
annual income equivilant to US$62,500. The rest of the population
combined had an average annual income equivalant to US$157.
Indian farmworkers had an average annual income of $10. Moreover,
in 1965 the mostly mestizo workers living on the coast were paid
seven times more than the mostly Indian workers living in the
mountains were paid. [Peruvian National Planning Institute, in
Bejar, IBID, pg 27]

RACISM, THEREFORE, HAS BEEN THE IDEOLOGICAL, POLITICAL AND
ORGANIZATIONAL PIVOT OF PERUVAIAN CAPITALISM. The Peruvian
working people are exploited and oppressed by Peruvian
capitalism, which is a racist exploitative system. Peru is a
hothouse of ruling-class-promoted racism; anti-Indian, anti-
black, anti-mestizo, coastal groups against highland groups
against forest groups. Racism is deep in the Peruvian social
consciousness. No one, except the SHINING PATH, denies this.
Racism runs through every social issue of the lst 400 years up to
this very moment. You can't get rid of the exploitation withoujt
at the same time getting rid of racism, just as you can't get rid
of the racism without at the same time getting rid of
exploitation. Both the market for labor power and the ideology of
racism  are primary targets of communist revolution. Anti-racist
struggle therefore must be a central aspect of the Peruvian
communist movement and its revolution.

A FINAL WORD

In the early 1960s the Left within the old commmunist movement
denounced almost all the existing parties for having turned into
fascist organizations. They denounced the socialist countries for
having become fascist socieites. The old maovement disintegrated,
as the Left split from the old parties and set up new parties.
This is how PLP was formed.

In those days Mao explained how a Communist Party could easily
"change color" and become a fascist party. All it needed to do
was promote pro-capitalist policies and abandon the mass line.
This would cause it to change class position and turn it from
being a workers' party to being a capitalist fascist party.

The Cultural Revolution carried the process of defining what a
communist party should stand for a step further. The communist
rebels who destroyed the old Chinese Communist Party, because it
was turning fascist, wanted to replace it with a communist party
that stood for egalitarianism, no money relations, no buying or
selling of labor power or of anything else. planned production of
those goods and services which working people needed, the mass
line in politics, culture, education and health care, and
democratic centralism. This is what the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY
stands for.

Now along comes the SHINING PATH, endlessly quoting Mao's words,
while consistently opposing their meaning. Despite what they may
thing about themselves or say about themselves, what are they
actually up to?

The SHINING PATH themselves tell us they are trying to lead a new
bourgeois revoluion to set up centralized state control over a
bourgeois economy. They don't believe you can carry out communist
revolution. their political theory is to be guided by the
authoritarian cult of the all-knowing Leader, not practicing
democratic centralism based on the mass line. In fact, their only
interest in the masses is to mobilize them to support the
Leader's orders. They explain to us why it is not so bad to be
implicitly racist, but already they are a little explicitly
racist.

Our experience as communists already ahs taught us that there is
no way any working class can benefit from this program. This is
not the shining path to communism.
                                    [By B.T.]


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